We’ve been talking about how to integrate sales and marketing teams, and this week, we’d like to shed some light on how it will optimize your company. According to MarketingProfs, organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing strategies had 36% higher customer retention rates and achieved 38% higher conversion rates – percentages high enough to get everyone’s attention. Sales-marketing integration generates proven success in the here and now, and even better, it paves the way for the future.
Making the decision to integrate your teams presents many challenges, but here are two benefits that make it worth the effort, leaving you positioned for great things down the road:
The smartest up-and-coming marketing and sales professionals consider themselves experts in digital community and social strategy. They consider social media marketing and customer service to be inseparable, and they can use them effectively for sales in any arena. By proving your company is facing the future with a marketing-savvy sales team, you’ll be in a position to recruit the best of the best.
In the world of complex B2B sales cycles, it can be difficult to measure the return on marketing investment. By aligning your marketing data with sales, you link each marketing dollar directly to the bottom line. There’s no better way to prove the value of your work, and you might find that marketing insight becomes more valued at your company as part of the whole. Manage your data carefully to find out exactly where you had the biggest impact, and be ready to use it to determine future investments. Remember that at the end of the day, everyone’s biggest interest is closing the deal.
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